Captain's Prerogative: CBS Suddenly Decides To Block Fan-Created Star Trek Show Despite Past Support
from the doesn't-that-violate-the-prime-directive? dept
When you hold the copyright to something really popular—a true cultural phenomenon—the rules tend to change a little bit. The sheer size of the fanbase means stomping out every instance of infringement is completely unrealistic, so creators like George Lucas often tolerate or even support fan fiction. Since creators and companies in this situation tend to just pick and choose where to enforce their rights, their actions are usually inconsistent (Lucasfilm also shut down a fan-organized movie marathon).
CBS, which owns the rights to the Star Trek franchise, is one such company. Though they've meddled in harmless fan creations before, they deserve credit for being generally quite supportive of such projects, most notably the 100% fan-created web-series Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II. But, as usual, inconsistency reins—Steve R. points us to the news that CBS has blocked Phase II from producing an episode based on a long-lost, unused Star Trek script.
Last fall an unused script for the cult 1960s television show turned up after being forgotten for years. Its author, the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, announced it would become an episode of a popular Web series, “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II,” which features amateur actors in the classic roles of Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and other crew members of the starship Enterprise.
But then another player stepped in: CBS, which said it owned the script and blocked a planned Web production of it.
There are a lot of details that are important to understanding what happened. For one thing, Phase II is not some slapdash production—the show has involved several Star Trek alumni (including Walter Koenig and creator Gene Roddenberry's son Eugene) both on and off camera, and the creators have enjoyed an open and supportive relationship with CBS. They found the contested script through Spinrad, the original writer (but not the copyright holder), who had been selling it online since he discovered a copy of it last year. CBS also had a brief dispute with Spinrad, which was settled with the removal of the script (and an agreement to make no further comment).
Spinrad and Phase II creator James Cawley don't seem bothered—though, if they were, they wouldn't/couldn't say so, Spinrad because of his agreement and Cawley because of his desire to stay on good terms with CBS. Meanwhile, the fans (who were excited by the prospect of a long-lost script) get nothing. So what exactly did CBS accomplish here? Spinrad's final comment about the dispute makes vague references to their plans to license the script, but it's still not clear why they couldn't let Phase II produce it anyway, especially considering they have supported them in the past. As people have pointed out, this isn't even the first time Phase II used an abandoned Star Trek script: the 2007 episode "Blood and Fire" was originally pitched to The Next Generation in the '80s. There may be a technical difference that some commentators are missing there, in that it seems like "Blood and Fire" was a rejected pitch while this new script was shelved during production, but exact details are hard to pin down. Either way, nobody can tell why CBS is suddenly exercising their rights over this one script when they have been so tolerant of Phase II in the past. Their statement doesn't offer much:
“We fully appreciate and respect the passion and creativity of the ‘Star Trek’ fan and creative communities,” CBS said in a statement. “This is simply a case of protecting our copyrighted material and the situation has been amicably resolved.”
Amicably? Maybe. Beneficially? Not as far as I can tell.